to take a fall
by timidyetinterpid
Summary: Your life is a collage, and you take her places. You travel together, you take her everywhere, mark her as your territory. You drool on each other in your sleep as you snuggle together in train seats, and stare at her through airplane windows. Maybe your life is a map, and you know it like her body. (your life is her)


If you were pretentious, you would begin from the end, and say life was like a 90s VHS tape and you were trapped on rewind. All you remember are beginnings and endings and all that sort of fucked up shit, and you liked placing chapter titles, as if that would clean up and make shit neat, as if your mother would applaud your sense of fucking organization, anything but that, everywhere but in your mind. (if you were pretentious, that is)

In some other godforsaken universe, maybe you could have been a writer and your life would have been a toothbrush, filthy and rough on the outside, and dry as a fucking desert, a stained mirror that you shared in those rare, unwanted moments of blissful, absurd, disgusting domesticity, watching her unroll her ridiculous curls, and you wished you were that perverted ugly mirror because then you'd finally get a kiss, giggly and vile and red, and you hated that this was your life now, and you hated that it wasn't.

.

Orange was a pointless color, as far as you were concerned. Orange was for lobsters, but hey, fuck the bourgeoisie, and stick it to the man. You wanted it ripped off of your skin, you wanted to gnaw your way out as Red held you tight and smelt of apricots and hairspray and wool, but it was just khaki, and it was pissed with tears and sweat (your own). You tried never to imagine Red cooking fancy food. Something told you that couldn't possibly end well. For a change, Red left nothing to be imagined, nothing to make up in your mind. She was real as real could be, and she never let you down.

You were not that kind of teen, not the sunset licking kind. You were a smart kid, good at math, crafty and shit, eager to impress until you came in terms with the fact that some people are never impressed, and those people ruin families at forty three and run away in pastel suits, because if people don't learn about your fuckups, then you're okay. She never caught you with a girl, and you didn't even try not to get caught. You highly doubt she'd give a flying fuck as long as you didn't flaunt your prize around in public. Everything's ok Nicole, unless people learn that it isn't.

It's not like you got enough pussy back then. You lacked excitement, you wanted beginnings. You wanted to travel, you wanted an all-parts-consensual no-strings-attached harem, a different map to touch every night. You jerked off a lot when you were a teen. You wanted to piss people off like, you know, teens want. You accomplished the beginning by starting to dress like the Arctic Monkeys. That was the worst that could happen for your mother. Not the money that went missing from her purse, not the pussy you wanted to lick, not the stolen taxis and the foul smells in your room, no. It was the thrift shop leather. "Your hair, Nicole, aren't you going to do something about that hair? Stop wearing second hand rugs, one would think I don't give you enough money to buy a good pair of Hogan!" That's right, because if you wore something worn by another, by a peasant, filthy enough to feel in need to sell their jacket, you might get infected with their bug and start smelling like a dyke, or a communist, or god knows what and then the world would simply _know_.

If you couldn't be someone she'd love, then you wanted to be someone she'd hate, but she sucked in everything, even in hating. You had to get away from what bought you and you had learnt to buy the world, you kept looking for a multiracial group of friends with all kinds of genitals and no kinds of labels so that you could feel like a _real_ kid that had a life to wait for, like in the movies, but you were stuck in the suburbs instead.

One could make godawful jokes about how _that_ part turned out to be in prison. One could suck your dick.

It was her, your _real_ mom who found you when you first od'd, who cried with you and took you to the hospital and slapped your face with so much love, that for one tiny fragment of a second, you thought you could be saved. Next week she was fired, nineteen was too fucking old for a nanny, nineteen was too fucking young to be bored of trying. People stopped slapping you. People got bored in your place. You were alone, and you were digging your own grave with a fancy teaspoon, clinking elegantly against your skull until it'd burst it wide open.

"Where have I gone wrong with you, Nicole?"

Do you want me to start?

No, no starts. Only endings.

Let's puke that orange sunset out.

.

"How do I look?"

"I don't know kid, you look very – uh, orange?"

She's standing there, in front of the mirror, a teary bouncy mess of hope and smudged mascara, and fuck if she's stopped crying and trying to play tough ever since she arrived, and fuck if she's not the most adorable lost puppy you've seen in ages. She brings back that gross jumpiness in your ovaries, and you hate yourself for not being able to identify it, for it being too soon to do excess again, you'd promised Red, you'd stay clean, clean of shit that'd fuck you up, only having fun, only character development, only books and screwdrivers and casual fucks. You're not like that, you don't get infatuated, you don't do commitment.

Turns out she does.

"Christopher will be waiting for me. I consider myself lucky, y'know, he's like, so involved in everything? He's left the whole planning thing to me, but we spent a whole phone call discussing the champagne, and what do you think, Nichols, you've grown up all fancy, sure you know about that?"

What was it that you liked on her in first place? Her exaggerated accent? Her internalized – what, racism, misogyny, homophobia? Her off-pitch laughter or the fiancé and all the ways you wanna gag every time you hear her say his name?

(It's the distorted way she views economics when you play Monopoly in the TV room, and the way she thinks you don't notice when she cheats. It's her lipstick as if there _has_ to be something left intact, her bullshitting her way through musical lyrics, and the way she coos while she shows you how to pluck your eyebrows.

And in the end of the day, it's how she comes while you're passed out in a tunnel, and says your name like it's alright.)

.

You catch Red staring. You know the thin scarlet line of her pursed lips that knows you're in trouble. She throws you a towel and nudges you at the ribs as you wipe plates dirtier than your soul. "She's as straight as the stick shoved up Fig's ass," she hisses. You shrug your shoulders. It's stopped hitting you like a punch in the gut long ago.

"Yeah, because there's a chance that anyone here is spared this piece of information," you snort.

"You're digging your own hole."

"Hey, it's not like I'm a masochist, okay? I'm like, a wise Epicurean hedonist Sirius Black in the vagina Azkaban, only more punk rock, and hella fucking gay."

Red looks unimpressed, stirring what once aspired to be vegetables. "Listen to me, Nicky. Sweet as Brooklyn Snow White may be, she's found her prince charming alright, and you'll be left with some mouldy apple from commissary."

"Mama knows best, huh?" your smirk, and receive a smack on the back of your head.

But you a good daughter. You know how to follow advice, at least when you're given any. So when she comes all bouncy and glowing because she discussed the bridesmaid's dresses with Christopher's mother, you act like she doesn't smash your heart like a jigsaw puzzle, and you act like you don't want her to sit on you with all the weight of the universe.

Until you act like you do.

.

Your life is a mixtape, and you're afraid it's started sounding like Lorna's tacky emotional 80s ballad shit, and you're getting tired of shuffling.

"Hey Nichols, lay your hands off of my oranges, willya?"

You walk out of the toilet, and wave your fingers at Boo's face. "Here, I'll let you take a sniff of my orange juice."

"Let's see, why don't you shove them up your ass?"

"I did, actually, but up Mason's. Sides, what about monogamy, huh? Does Mercy know about your squeezing fresh beverages?"

"Maybe we should ask your protégé that, eh Nichols?"

You both know who she means, and you wish it would surprise you.

.

She cries all the time, and it's taking the best of her. She cries for lies you refuse to believe, while you never shed a tear for a truth you're trying to refuse. It's time for faith, and shit, Pensattucky hasn't been spotted lusting over Jesus around the chapel today and you're 91% sure that Washington has no one to come here but you (certainly not Jefferson), after the last time you tasted her distant cackles at the corner. So you leave the Fathers pretending they're just friends while you secretly loathe a friendship level such as that of Mackenzie and Amanda's, and hold Morello as she ruins her fancy makeup, shaking in your arms, tiny and restricted and perfectly not yours.

"I ruined everything, didn't I?"

"Look, to be honest, I'd be fucking ecstatic if you hadn't done something as stupid as stealing Jimmy Choos or whatever pretentious shit and landing your sorry ass in here, but hey, if you hadn't, how in Jesus' name would I have met you?"

She stifles a small laugh in your neck. Part of you shudders. "Maybe we should leave Jesus alone in here, what d'ya say?"

"What, he'll hear us and send his girlfriend Tucky slit our throats?" you snort, fiddling with the cross on her neck. "I thought Take me to Church was your thing?"

"Yeah well," she giggles softly, wiping her tears with her wrist. "The guys in the video clip are _hot_ , so…" she shrugs her shoulders.

"Listen, it's fine to be so heterosexual, but you don't have to flaunt it in my face, okay?"

She pinches your sides, and you try to pretend you don't feel like a horny teenager who comes in his pants at her touch, because pride is one thing, and self-respect is pretty much the same thing, only minus the wet dreams in a prison bunk.

"Hey, ya don't even know me, Nichols! Maybe in another universe I could be like, the blond Greek hottie with the straightener to your Brad Pitt!"

There are those moments of utter confusion with Morello, and then there are those other moments, where you consider abandoning humanity. "You mean Patroclus," you breathe, in utter horror. "You mean Patroclus and _Achilles._ You just reduced the gayest ship to ever gay in the entire classic canon to a queerbaiting pair of pussies in the biggest disgrace of a movie this fucked up world ever had the honor to be blessed with? The one with the scene with the Christian Orthodox priests in _Agamemnon's_ _palace,_ for fuck's sake?"

"So they _were_ gay!" she cheers. "I knew it all along!"

"God, Morello, well so did Aeschylus!"

She raises her doe eyes to you, plays with a strand of your hair. "I like that hipster junkie philosopher thing you've got going, bossing people around and then say the right thing when they're down," she murmurs. She's staring at your lips and you feel them dry on you, you wonder what it's been like for them to feel like lips in the past. "It's… refreshing, y'know. To see you so invested in something. I like… doing this wit' you."

"What, _cry_ on me?" your voice is a scratch. "You feelin' pretty and witty and gay, uh Morello?" You try so hard to sound sarcastic, but it seems like everything's dried dead midway, and her hand is under your shirt, cupping your tit, fingers sliding under your granny bra, and all you can be at this point is thankful for your fucked up heart, for the excuse that's giving you away, and somehow you know you're the one who pushed for this in first place, but she's the beginning, and your nipples pressing rough against her thumbs are her signature on a messy contract, in a language you're not sure she can read.

You're hungry, tasting her all over, your teeth try to lock on her neck because you want to delay things, this might be all you'll ever get and she's sweet, your fingers know that already, she's wet with your words and coming apart with a name you can't quite grasp.

You choose to be nameless.

.

In another universe you would be a reader. You would be a writer, a philosopher, a fluffy junkie cat with one too many lives. In another universe you'd have to earn your worth, and you'd have it recognized. In another universe you'd been born inside her, and die resurrected.

In this universe, she's living a dream and you consist of nightmares, the cringeworthy kind, where you go to school in flippers and suck dicks to get your fix. She's delusional and flawless, the rotten kind, and you're just an ostensibly confident, pussy licking dyke with severe mommy issues. You've long forgotten the part where you were running away with it like Chapman and Vause still do. Now you eat her for lunch every day under CO's oblivious noses, and you listen to her Christopher nonsense willingly because there's nothing that you'd rather do, because in Greek there are two different words for loving her and _loving her,_ but you're Icarus, dizzy with a heatstroke, and you don't know shit anymore.

"Thank you, Nichols," she croons as you wipe your mouth clean with the back of your hand. "You're a good friend."

And the next time she thanks you, you swallow her words and you swallow the planet in your throat and let it suck the constellations in your ribs until her ashes sink down your belly, as you say "Hey, that's what friends do, huh? They help each other out!"

So you eat her pussy and you secretly suck her breath in her sleep, wishing you could eat yourself raw and she's coming she's coming _almost there Nicky_ she's around you all over you and you consume her yeses because there is no love for the suffocated, only for those who drown them down and you don't think Christopher will mind if it is with a girl, right? you don't think Christopher will mind if it's a friend helping me get by? you don't think Christopher will mind if you decide he don't exist and suffocate him with his pillow thirteen times so that you can be whole, and fit in me?

"Fucksake isn't there anything else you can do with that pretty mouth of yours?"

She does you.

(it's all she does)

.

"Pussies. I don't believe in getting sick."

Morello groans, covers up and tells you to go away, she doesn't want you to see her like that, even though you just told her she's hot. She tells you to go back to work and leave her alone. You tell her to piss off and spoon on her bed. Later on, you plead Red for some Vitamin C. She arches an eyebrow. "Why, has Christopher spoilt her with orange juice and broth?"

You return to holding her and brushing her sweaty hair off her face, and she willingly leans in without mentioning Christopher until you land your sorry ass to the SHU again. You fuck up again and again and you count on Norma and Gina to soften Red and her wrath.

When you get out she's nowhere to be seen, on duty driving up the new inmates, and you retreat to the cowardly shelter of your earphones like the day Chapman arrived. When she returns she comes straight to you with her innocent smile, she kisses your forehead and your wrists, and drags you outside with her soft little hands, to fuck you so hard you forget you exist.

You lie on the grass, she strokes your hair and radiates warmth that's not her own, and you want to cheat on her, so you tell the sky that she never really kisses you.

.

The floor is sliding away underneath your knees and you try to play it cool as if you don't want to punch a hole on the fucking altar because Morello thinks _her_ hole is too big. On second thoughts, she deserves it much more than the Jesus place for saying such ungodly, ridiculous things, but you've sworn you'll hurt whoever hurts her, and you don't remember the last time you didn't ache.

You don't have much tolerance left for her shit anymore. You've had it up your throat to the point that it's blocked and you can't breathe, and you want to be left alone with your pretentious Smiths songs, thinking of the times when you went out with people who were young and alive (or maybe of those when you dreamt of throwing yourself in front of a double-decker bus). A weight presses constantly against your forehead, for once unfairness doesn't feel dull, but it makes your whole body pump nervously, your joints twitch, your muscles tense and untense until you find your pace, until you feel hatred even for those you love the most, Tricia who needs you but doesn't listen to you, Red who insists on playing it tough and keeps reminding you Rule #1 with her eyes, _Don't fall for the straight girl,_ until you want to wreck her fucking kitchen. She says you should have listened to your mother, and you're on the verge of asking, what mother, Red? The one I keep imagining behind the glass, moping like a pathetic, begging child every time Chapman gets a visit? Which mom you talkin about, mama? The one that Tricia needs? The one who's killing her?

The one she's dreaming of stretching her cunt to be one day?

(you could be a mother. now that you've watched a child being taken away in a plastic bag, you think you could be a mother. then, in a sense, you wouldn't have to live.)

.

Your life is a collage, and you take her places. You travel together, you take her everywhere, mark her as your territory. You drool on each other in your sleep as you snuggle together in train seats, and stare at her through airplane windows. You want to go get married in Dublin and lie beneath the cherry trees in Kyoto and get drunk with the Seine. Maybe your life is a map, and you know it like her body.

(your life is her)

.

Vause feels soft and tastes rough and lets you win this round as she arches her back and writhes around you. She's the hottest you've had in a while and she looks at you as if you own flames. She touches you deftly and comes undone on you as you forget to think how much you need this, maybe it's good that you're both spent and tired, and that your foreheads are tired when they falter.

"You coming to the Christmas play?" she asks you, fastening her bra under her shirt.

"Yeah, because what a better fucking way to spend my evening praising some non-existent lord for punishing me for all the destructing shit he made me do in first place, huh? That's some pretty deterministic, classist, delirious shit, huh?"

"And I suppose you know classist and delirious better than most?"

"Man, we've already established that you know me well enough you probably gave birth to me!" you lightly punch her arm. "Sides, we all know that Christian Supremacy is such a manipulative bitch, that She'll play some kinda miracle trick, like make Norma sing, so that emotionally fucked up people like Chapman and Morello will weep angel tears. And do we want to witness that?"

"We sure as fuck don't, sister," she chuckles hoarsely.

At this point no one really cares about what two gay heartbroken losers do in their bunks, so you get to snuggle yourselves into oblivion.

.

You hate the effect that Christmas has on you and you hate the way you invent things that don't exist. Christmas used to pump you up with excitement, expectations for a family feeling you'd never experienced, and later for a happy, reliable group of friends in ugly festive sweaters, who would have your backs at all times and always be up for casual poly orgies. You've always been one hell of a planner, setting up parties and meetups, buying presents and baking for your mother (receiving in return a Parisian doll shipped from her hotel, and later the occasional bottle of Eau d'Hermes in satin fucking ribbon), only to fall asleep alone in front of the TV, craving a fix before you even tried one. Last year was the first one that it almost worked, and you promised to yourself to at least have this.

You learn later that Norma took everyone's voices away, and that few things had been more ridiculous than Madonna Morello. You wouldn't know. You slept like the dead, drooling all over your pillow till Christmas dawn. You heard her muffled crying in her bunk, you thought about the Secret Santa she wouldn't receive. You found her amidst a pile of Christmas cards that she rushed to hide the moment you walked in.

"Tell me if there's anything I can give you," you muttered hoarsely. "If there's anything I have that you can use."

Your heart throbbed, splitting through you like a bullet someone else had planted, a scar that didn't quite belong to you, as she shut her teary eyes and parted the red shield of her lips, cutting the distance between you.

You felt her or you thought you did. You tasted salt without touching her lips, and you stood up before she could rip you open.

"Sorry kiddo."

You were protecting yourself, and you wanted to die and Christmas rose unloved, and you existed.

.

In the future you'll think of it like a mirror part, a fragment of some ridiculous romantic comedy or just its script, or just the wetness because you felt nothing, you really didn't. Maybe you should have rehearsed it. Maybe you were already getting numb. Maybe she was pressed too close to you, and maybe all you needed her was to be whole, and to end this before it started. It might have been some ridiculous shine of Kantian ethics, the Fourth Formulation: _Hold your friend with benefits when she cries on a rowdy newspaper and let her dampen your khakis but not with come, and call a girl you don't know a slut even though your heart is trying to break itself from the very beginning._

There's something sick about this, and it only feels healthy when she's gone. The way you smell her hair on your shirt. The way you kiss your wrists where she clung on you. The salty taste of desperation, a red mark on your throat. The mirror examines it. How do I look, mirror? Do I look like I promised?

Do I look like I'm wood and water, and like my fire never happened?

.

You fuck the girl in orange who talks too much and makes your day seem like a riot turned into a peaceful protest. You are the tough girl who got high and read Foucault and Marx while those ignorant kids got beaten up on the streets shouting lousy shit that weren't even witty. You were superior, you still are, because you've mastered the art of not giving any fucks and giving yourself over until you die, as if you weren't privileged and spoilt and pathetic, as if you weren't lost and empty and tried to fill in the void with angry shit and movies made by white mother hating gay boys.

Part of you knows how important the Japanese-Scottish thing is for her, but you reduce it to laughing material because you can, because you hate seeing yourself in her and seeing everything you'd ever avoid and ever pretend to be and what not. What makes you wanna vomit, her ridiculous resistance to the showers, is part of what you once wished you owned, when you spent hours in front of the mirror fitting in black dresses and ripping your tights and smoking your eyes to convince yourself what you were such a thick skinned badass whom nothing'd ever hurt. You tried to cause pain to others for redemption, then forget you'd ever met them while you read about solidarity and revolution. How you miss your first addiction, how you miss your coffee, your cigarettes, how you miss _her_ and the way she tasted in your mind, the only girlfriend that never ditched you, the excess that taught you what you'd never be caught with

(alive)

You shut her mouth with your cunt (and boy does she eat you right).

You crack up at the realization that she wants you for a prison wife. It's the most absurd you've had in years, and you'd expect it from no one else but her. You slap her ass, plotting how you'll hurt the fuck out of her because she deserves none of it and because she deserves it all, because she's like you and because all you've got left is the pleasure of giving everything away altruistically to people who don't touch you, of taking away all that's been taken away from you, the leather and the smoke and the booze and the warmth of being a person with two dead hearts and holding each other because you're a bad bitch and you fuck shit up but never yourself, never what you taste like.

"Why are you here, Nichols?"

God how inspirational, how revolutionary, how hipster, what a privilege, what a bitch, what'cha gonna do, (eatmeraw), # _Jaituémamère_

(i'm sory kiddo, _cela ne devrait pas être ta vie_ )

 _T'était quelque chose qu'je pourrais avoir aimé._

.

Sophia is bleaching your hair and you know this is some dangerous shit so you respect the fuck out of her because this is what you do to a maternal figure you'd die to fuck.

"So how's the life of the Gryffindor emblem? Any good?"

You smirk at the mirror, silently cooing at the pride in her pastel flawless smile.

"We do what we can, Burset. How's your kid doin'?"

It gives her so much pleasure you'd ask her again, a thousand times just to see it. "Aced a test. He told me on the phone. I was never good at algebra myself!"

"Good for 'im," you smile encouragingly. "Math was my strong spot once."

"Really?"

"Ah, my life itself was like, an equation, with all the right bits missing."

"Are you hitting on me, Nichols?"

"I'll sincerely let you know that you're a 9 in the scale."

"Watch me how _sincerely_ I burn your hair."

"Gotcha Burset," you murmur, gnawing on your lip as she pulls a strand of your mane. "Stay safe."

She smiles at you like she knows you were born screwed. "Stay safe."

Your life is a joke, and you fall asleep in the middle of the punchline.

.

The one time you know Flaca won't go around blabbering about shit is the time you fuck her in the Spanish harlem showers. It's impressive, she even makes an effort not to be heard as you play with her clit and she quivers like an earthquake she's swallowed up and silenced down, someone'd think she doesn't want people to know has as a Nichols fuckbook entry. Sometimes you impress yourself, huh? Like, where did all the heterosexuals go? You made them illegal? Are you fucking Obama? Are you fucking _his wife?_ Can you finally outlaw all the actresses you secretly hope they were gay and turned out to be straight and happier than you, the straight girls that got flattered when you hit on them?

"Ay, dios mio - don't... don't you fuck with the Loca - ah, Bride Girl no more?" she asks you breathlessly as you suck on her tit.

Your teeth might do a thing to her nipple but suddenly you realize it's not enough for them, not even with the gasp that leaves her, not even with your hands occupied. Icarus can't breathe, Icarus needs a smoke, something to burn him from the inside. Icarus craves the twitching between his ribs, the mechanic haziness in his head.

It's obscene, how the Gods write you, how the sun starts taking long naps between the rehearsals. Jefferson finds you, and next thing you know a cigarette's burning your throat, and very next thing you've got _her_ between your fingers and you're shaking all over, everything's on pause and on mute, and you see your life through the looking glass. She looks white and powdery and suddenly no one's in it but you and your right to be alone, and the right of your body to stretch its fucking wings.

It begins with Gina following you everywhere and yourself definitely not panicking while you discuss with Luschek whether Pluto is or not a planet (spoiler alert: it really fucking is) and, as usually, you want to punch his face and maybe measure your screwdrivers and your dicks and make sure he loses in everything. He notices her, he says something inconsiderate. You want to shrug your shoulders.

"Tell your mom and her minions you're busy now, inmate."

"Yyyeah, or maybe, I could not tell them anything? Y'know, rebellious teenager with untamed hair, and all that? Fuck it all, just let me focus on my job for once, willya?"

If you were pretentious, you'd make alliterations about wombs and tombs, and everything in between, and how it keeps confusing you.

(spoiler alert: you really fucking are)

 _Your life is a garbage can and its garbage man in its little fluorescent orange suit dictating what you can never throw away. Your life is a donut, so much sweet stuff and a giant hole in the middle, and your life is bad poetry_

 _hitting_  
 _enter_  
 _too much_

I do.

Your life is a journal, things don't really happen, they just get noted down so that they can make sense when your mind shuts down and you stop living things anymore, because they're too much or too little to begin with, or to end with, or to make yourself keep going. You wonder if your memories work like your fuckbook, if your hands are a page you can turn to when you want to remember what her hands felt against your skin earlier today, and build a new reality that smells like her.

Still, you don't let yourself get too excited that she seems to want to spend all that time with you, that you even recognize a hint of awkwardness in the way she addresses you, as if you've only just met, as if you haven't been friends for all those months (that's because you haven't). You don't dare get your hopes up, you know by now that you're disposable, you know what she'll ever be inclined to give you, yet it's started feeling better that way. The frantic jam of your heart hardly ever ceases, it becomes a constant reality instead, considering how close you are, one that (almost) makes sense.

On mother's day you don't talk about mothers. Red is busy meeting her sons, Dudebro number 1, 2 and 3, and husband Baldie Sleaznikov, and Lorna's doing toilet paper duty with her ridiculous sparkly sunnies on. On mother's day, you talk about kids.

"Hey, do you think that Bennett will turn all Remus Lupin on the Diaz girl, but without the angsty-Potter-talks-the-real-shit plot twist?"

"Wha- oh yeah! Nah," she waves her hand dismissively as you both turn your heads to the sunbathing Latinas and the trying-too-hard CO. "He's so cute! Y'know I _think_ I'd have kids with him!"

"What the fuck man! I thought we just established that kids are a waste of space?"

She looks at you with that smile she's got at the absurd moments when you _know_ she's gonna speak logic. "Is that what you thought when you were a kiddo?"

Yeah Nicky, because no one ever denied your being an elitist ten year old piece of shit who deemed little boys gross and stupid but was _not like other girls_ , not like other dumb bitches who only cared for boys and mascara, no you and your internalized misogyny were superior, but you also happened to be a kid, one that hadn't traveled, one that hadn't drunk, _a smart kid with dropping grades whose potential is woefully invested in insulting her superiors and being the class clown_ because you craved attention, and all you ever got was a chance to never grow up.

"Hey, imagine if we had like, kids together? Wouldn't that be fun?"

"Yeah, except from the part where they'd turn out to be complete fuckups."

She purses her lips angrily and sits up. "Uh, that so? Is this your way of calling me crazy, Nichols?"

"Mostly my way of calling me an ex-heroin addict, but hey, go on, way to make assumptions!" you murmur lightly, unsure of the dryness it causes to your tongue.

"Aw, but think of how lucky those kids would be, y'know, inheriting your eyes and possibly your ass!"

"Yeah, cause that's exactly what a mother should wish upon her offspring, a nice round dyke ass, especially in prison khakis!"

"Well, and my white girl skills of making mascara out of Oreos!" at which you choke because _fucking Lorna_.

"D'you think I'd make a good mama, Nicky?" she asks with hope.

"Honestly? I think you'd make a terrible mother," you say, and you don't know if you mean it. "In a good way."

She elbows you and you think you know pain, until she says "I think you'd make a great mother to my kids, Nichols."

It sounds obscene and horrible, and so _so_ good you wonder how it hadn't haunted your best nightmares before, and at this point you wish Lorna's paradoxal bisexual heteronormativity would be enough to call you a dad instead.

"Hey Morello," you smirk because that's all you know how to do, "want me to give you a child tonight?" and it means nothing, her liquid laughter doesn't, the warmth pooling in the pit of your stomach doesn't, you've just met and you're starting all over, you're empty, a tabula rasa, and she takes your hand in hers.

It's a yes, and you spend the night touching each other, not in that way, and in every right way.

.

When you are fifteen you chop off your hair to see if you'll fit better in some fat gay pixie's skin. The truth is, every skin itches too much, and now you've got nothing to grasp on but your thighs that are already covered in scratches, and your lips bleed and your knuckles ache and you want to nap with your feet up in the air but not at home because you're made of cement.

When you are four you watch the Sound of Music and you are naïve enough to love it so much that Anais has to sing So Long, Farewell every night for you to go to sleep. It's your first addiction. Your second comes shortly after, it tastes like coffee and it smells like leather, there's wind blowing on your face and you feel ugly with every clumsy pavement that you cross. Your third has sunflowers, and a girl who doesn't quite know how to cycle. It comes with saving people, with bossing them around and with tucking them to bed. The third one is in a car, it consists of perky nipples peaking under coral satin, of some exception of a boyfriend with a nice ass, of a smirk that begins to feel a bit like you when the front mirror practices it against you. You're made of smoke, you're ended before you taste the soil.

She comes in some party, her voice like Vause's, her bosom soft and mellow, biting against your ribs, planting a heart on your throat, hissing ( y), giving birth to you in a laundry basket, under the pale lights of a kitchen that knows how to waltz, on rooftops, together, a family of temples pressed together, a universe in your pocket and a cult inside you, your tongue all over it, you punch her face like you own yourself, like your blood will make her invincible. She's your addiction. _She's_ the one. You begin to write a story as she rides you every night, as you look for her in alleyways and on your dirty knickers, as you scream at her ( h) until your lungs are bleeding. You steal a motorbike, you steal a paper robe, you steal a prison cell. This way you'll never have to go home again. You feel too small for this world, too spread over, too muddy. You find her again. Her lipstick is red. And again. In a black plastic bag. In a clear plastic bag. In your veins. A hand presses against your own. You taste metal. It's an engagement ring.

Maybe in some other universe Icarus will go home.

.

Count to ten, baby. The storm will be over when you're done. The sun will shine, you'll be seeing rainbows. Wrap around yourself, be safe. You know that the soft skin on your kneecaps that bears most of your childhood scars will always smell like home. Come here, say your prayer, a Nirvana song, an Audre Lorde line, whatever you believe in. Count to ten girl, the orgasm will soon be over, the moth will have been burnt. Cry, woman, cry for the faith you betrayed, cry for the arms you'll miss. Get your shit together, corpse. Face your mistakes. Stop wanting to _live_ so much, what the fuck is wrong with you. Count to thirteen, Nicole. Remember what I told you. This is your end here. You wrote it, you drew the line. Don't be such a pussy. Go to fucking hell, you disgrace of your fucking name, of your hair and of everything that ever got tangled between it. Madness will serve you right, loneliness doesn't exist anymore. Suck your fire, suck your pride. There, swallow it down, that's a good girl. Don't look at her. Act as if she doesn't exist, and hopefully one day she'll decide she imagined you. Break her heart, baby. Break her fucking heart. You didn't mean any of this, you're not even sorry. Ashes can't be. Don't look at her, look at your cage. Look at what's pressing against you, focus on it. Look at what you'll never have. Life isn't fair, kiddo. Look at me. There, focus. Repeat after me. You're a fuckup. You're a pile of crap. You're hissing at your reflection (you have no reflection). You're done for, sweetheart.

 _I love you._

Look at your hands, look at the socks you used to share, look at the fingers that used to tangle around your own. Don't look at the window, they're driving you away, you're setting them free.

Summer is coming. Mama's going to the sea. Count to ten, baby.

.

.

(i love you too)


End file.
